Friday, July 25, 2014

My Trip to Yosemite (the OS not the place)

Ready to take the plunge?

I am one of the million people who signed up for Apple’s public beta of OS 10.10 Yosemite. I suspect that I am not unique among my friends and that the few hundred people I know probably contain a few others who are either also in the public beta pool or have Apple developer accounts (no limit on the numbers, pay your $99 and you’re in). The developer accounts also have the chance to download XCode 6 beta and play with the new Swift programming language, and they can download the beta versions of iOS 8, though I’m not trusting my phone to beta software. Nor am I trusting my computer to beta software.

I took the reasonably prudent course and installed Yosemite on a second, smaller partition. That was, itself, a bit of a trial. Or, several trials. I opened up Disk Utility and attempted to create a new partition. And I locked up my computer. So, I quit everything, and tried again.

And I locked up my computer.

Then I booted into Recovery mode. The first time, it almost made it, but failed on the “shrinking disk” process (which, as far as I can tell is a defrag). Then next time failed later, and the “shrinking disk” part was quicker. I rebooted, and tried again. Somehow, in the multiple reboots, despite my clicking the “Cancel” button (as in “do not reload my applications”) each time, Safari and Chrome decided that I really wanted to load them. And the whole thing hung up.

Finally, I rebooted, waited for Safari and Chrome to launch and quit, and then I gave it one last try. It succeeded. Now I was ready for the installation.

I did try to leap past this and use an external drive that had plenty of room on it, but it wasn’t suitable due to a formatting issue. In any case, after I tried the external drive, that’s when Disk Utility finally made a 50Gb partition on my hard drive. I was ready to install Yosemite.

The installation went pretty much like every other OS X installation I’ve been through. At least, every one since they moved things to the App Store. Of course, I still remember when new systems came on floppies. Mac System 6 was something. Multifinder! But I should get back to the 10.10 install.

I clicked through everything, deciding not to import any of my settings, though I did connect it with my iCloud account (but not iCloud Drive). None of my iOS devices are on iCloud Drive (because it’s in beta), so for that I need to keep with iCloud. That means my frequent workflow between laptop and iPad (with occasinal detour to iPhone) will be interrupted.

My e-mail and photos are not making the trip the the beta. The last time I had a problem with my e-mail, it took a couple weeks to sort everything out. No way. I got the install done, and that was it for the day. I had tied up my computer for about four or five hours for the whole thing.

Updates already?

In the morning (yeah, we’re up to Friday), my Mac told me there were some updates to be installed (two incremental updates of iTunes), and it asked me if I wanted it to install updates automatically. Sure! Then I decided to go for this document, which I started on my iPad, so it was time to reboot my computer. Once I’d moved the file to a place where I could access it, it was time to reboot again so I could experience Yosemite.

Look familiar?

It seems to boot more slowly than 10.9, though maybe I’m just reacting to the change of the determinate progress bar from the (indeterminate) spinning wheel. Once through that, it seems snappier. Safari seems to load faster. In a typical day, I’ll use a small set of programs. That I’ve used only Safari, Byword (Multimarkdown text editor that I use to generate HTML for these things), Twitter, and Calculator is completely typical.

In order to do anything with Yosemite, and get an idea about using it, all I’ve opened are those four applications, two of which I’ve loaded from the App Store. (I did notice when I right-clicked a file, that it gave me the option of opening things with all the applications on my computer (all the ones on the other partition). When I tried indicating Byword, it actually launched the copy on my main drive, so I just quickly closed it and dragged my file to the icon in the dock.

Onward to looks: Yosemite is the cleanest looking Mac interface ever. It just looks great. I love the new flat buttons. The general appearace is sharp and clean.

So far, I haven’t run into any problems, but I’ll let you know if I do. I can’t wait until I’m using it all the time (which should come pretty soon). I will probably add applications on a daily basis, although the two applications I tend to use a lot (Mail and iPhoto) are not making the trip.
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